During the last years, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology has attracted great attentions in the area of wireless communications. The hardware implementation of MIMO decoders becomes a challenging task as the complexity of the MIMO system increases. This thesis presents hardware/software co-design architecture and implementations of two typical lattice decoding algorithms, including Agrell and Vardy (AV) algorithm and Viterbo and Boutros (VB) algorithm. Three levels of parallelisms are analyzed for an efficient implementation with the preprocessing part on embedded MicroBlaze soft processor and the decoding part on customized hardware. The decoders for a 4 by 4 MIMO system with 16-QAM modulation scheme are prototyped on a Xilinx XC2VP30 FPGA device. The hardware implementations of the AV and VB decoders show that they support up to 81 Mbps and 37 Mbps data rate respectively. The performances in terms of resource utilizations and BER are also compared between these two decoders
